Supervisors

Newsom’s Sunshineless Solar

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Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to be known as the Green Mayor. But he could go down in history as the mayor who secretly diverted public money from large municipally owned solar installations to subsidize privately owned solar panels.

Since January, Newsom has tried to kick start two questionably financed solar programs.

The first plan involved raiding $50 million from a seismic safety loan fund. That idea got shelved in the New Year, when the Board of Supervisors asked why these funds couldn’t be used to seismically retrofit affordable housing units, rather than subsidize private solar installations?

The second plan is involved diverting $3 million from the Mayor’s Energy Conservation Account, which was set up in 2001 to increase energy efficiency and reduce cost of energy use.

Since then, $39 million has been allocated to MECA with $10 million allocated in the current fiscal year, 2007-2008.
These monies come from the General Fund and are under the purview of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

Deputy Controller Monique Zmuda says so far all projects funded by MECA have benefited city facilities and PUC facilities.

“These funds have not been used to my knowledge to subsidize or loan funds to privately owned energy conservation projects,” Zmuda told the Guardian.

MECA funded projects include solar panels at Moscone, the replacement of refrigerators at the San Francisco Housing Authority, solar projects at MUNI, a new heating system at the central plant of San Francisco General Hospital, Solar projects at San Francisco Airport, a Solar project at North Point, and Port Energy Efficiency.

But under the Mayor’s Solar Energy Incentive Program, these public monies would be used to help subsidize the installation of solar panels on privately owned buildings and homes.The program places a $10,000 cap on the subsidizing of solar on private property.

Chop from the top

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OPINION San Francisco officials released two very different documents last week. The first was a list of the 596 city employees making $150,000 a year or more in base salary. The second was a letter to the 334 patients of the Chronic Care Public Health Nursing program informing them that as of April 15 they will no longer have a public-health nurse helping them manage their illnesses.

You might expect that when the mayor proposes an "across the board" budget cut from city departments because of a looming budget deficit, almost any position in city government would be on the table. You might expect that maintaining services to the most vulnerable city residents would be a priority. But according to these two documents, you’re safe if your salary is $150,000 or more, and you are abandoned if you are poor, frail, and chronically ill.

Last week, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin suggested that instead of just cutting from the bottom, the city also consider cuts at the top. "So let me understand," the Chronicle quotes District Attorney Kamala Harris (No. 55 on the top-earners list), "Aaron Peskin is basically saying we should eliminate all the doctors and lawyers who work for the city."

But Harris didn’t understand. Peskin isn’t proposing to cut all of those 596 positions. He is proposing that in a fiscal crisis, the agenda should include some cutting from the top, not just the bottom.

As a public health nurse in the program slated for closure, I’ve been working to treat and make plans for my patients during the day, while working at night to keep the program open. I’m not worried about my job: nurses are in high demand and there’s comparable pay in many private hospitals. But private health care rarely serves the people I’ve come to know doing this job for the past year: frail, uninsured elderly folks with no families; patients who face language and literacy barriers who can’t navigate the system and use emergency rooms when they feel sick; long-time residents of Laguna Honda Hospital coming back to the community not knowing how to use a cell phone, let alone monitor their diabetes.

As the number of chronically ill people skyrockets, along with the costs of caring for them, it would seem a no-brainer to fund a group of nurses who are experts in keeping those folks out of the hospital. But our health care system still operates on an acute-care model. While Medi-Cal will pay the city much of the expense of sending a nurse to do brief wound care for a diabetic, it pays much less for a nurse to keep that same person healthy enough to avoid the next wound. Calcuutf8g future savings from chronic care health services is hard. So on paper at least, it’s a money-saver, if not the moral choice, to close the program.

When I was in nursing school, my public health professors told me, "in Public Health, you have to be an advocate, because your patients can’t be." But I bet those 596 top earners can defend themselves — and Peskin is right, some of them should be given the opportunity.

Stefan Lynch

Stefan Lynch, RN, is a public health nurse at the San Francisco Department of Public Health and a member of Service Employees International Union 1021.

Emeric Kalman, 1931-2008

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Emeric Kalman, a neighborhood activist well known for his decades-long work of bringing important issues concerning the city’s public services and infrastructure to officials at City Hall, died March 22, on his 77th birthday, after battling cancer for several months.

Trained as a mechanical engineer, Kalman fled communist Romania in 1968 with his wife, Valeria, settled in West Portal, and worked at Bechtel from 1970 to the late 1980s. After retiring, he used his considerable expertise and proficiency with highly technical documents to bring to light waste and inefficiency in numerous city departments.

"Emeric contributed his research, his knowledge from his engineering background, his sense of fiscal prudence and accountability, and his demand for transparency and sunshine to making the city a better place for its citizens," said Joan Girardot, head of the Marina Civic Improvement and Property Owners Association and a former president of the Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods.

In 1997, Kalman and fellow watchdog Girardot brought an important story to the Guardian — one that was critical to understanding why the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (PUC) had failed to make regular repairs to the city’s vast water system, which flows from Yosemite to San Francisco. Kalman and Girardot discovered that by using an accounting trick to create an artificial yearly "surplus," the PUC had been transferring millions of dollars annually since 1979 to the city’s general fund — an amount adding up to half a billion dollars. Instead of going toward the care of the system, the money went to sparing officials the political difficulty of having to raise taxes after the 1978 passage of Proposition 13 drastically reduced municipal coffers. (see "The Water Bond-doggle," 8/27/97).

By that time, Kalman had established himself as a trusted source, having discovered numerous problems with the privatization of Presidio National Park and the San Francisco Zoo earlier in the 1990s. In fact, it was Kalman and Girardot who convinced city officials to force the zoo to at least list all of the facility’s assets before they handed it over to the private zoological society.

Tenacious in his activism, Kalman never walked away from an issue. For example, he joined Girardot and other activists in taking the Recreation and Park Department to task in 1997 when it voted to end all public review of how the zoo spent its annual multimillion-dollar grant from the city. (see "The Secret Zoo," 11/26/97). Since the late 1980s, he dedicated himself, along with Girardot, to the ongoing fight against the city’s neglect of regular repairs to the Marina Yacht Harbor and its overly expensive proposal to overhaul the facility, making it more suitable to the owners of high-end yachts and possible privatization — and likely destroying the use of an important public open space in the process. (see "Bay Watch," 2/28/01)

On March 17, the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution commending Kalman for his "outstanding contributions to the community." Sponsored by District 7 Supervisor Sean Elsbernd, with whom Kalman had worked most recently in an unsuccessful fight against the PUC’s proposal to raise water rates, the resolution recognized both Kalman’s stubbornness as well as his gracious demeanor (it was not unusual for him to kiss the hands of female city clerks). "Emeric’s old world gentility and grace, combined with new world zeal for justice and fairness in government, made him a force to be reckoned with and a real asset to San Francisco," Elsbernd said. "He was, in a word, undaunted."

Kalman is survived by his son, Ronald; his ex-wife, Valeria; his sister, Judith Ertsey; his nephew, Robert; and his two grandnieces, Elianna and Roxanna — all residents of San Francisco. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in Kalman’s name to the National Alliance for Mental Illness. A memorial service will be held April 2, 12:45 p.m., at the Hills of Eternity Cemetery Chapel, 1301 El Camino Real, Colma.

Savannah Blackwell is a former Guardian reporter.

Rip up the mayor’s club-violence plan

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EDITORIAL Back in January, 34-year-old Clarence Corbin was shot and killed during a fight outside Jelly’s Dance Café nightclub in Mission Bay. Mayor Gavin Newsom leapt into action, announcing that this sort of violence was unacceptable. We’re with the mayor on that, although we wish he’d shown the same kind of energy in dealing with the epidemic of shootings in the Bayview and Western Addition over the past few years.

But his solution — a crackdown on nightclub promoters — is unlikely to do anything about violence and will almost certainly damage the creative underside of the city’s entertainment scene.

Sup. Sophie Maxwell is carrying the mayor’s legislation, which she introduced March 4. Some of the provisions just seem silly: the bill, for example, would ban "loitering" within 10 feet of a club between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. Of course, people stand outside clubs all the time — among other things, to smoke cigarettes — so the bill says smokers would be exempted. So would people who are waiting for cabs. People who simply wanted some fresh air or to make a phone call (or to make out away from the dance floor) would be subject to fines. The loitering law, like most similar laws, seems like a blueprint for discriminatory and illegal enforcement. (Will young African American men get cited more often than white people? Of course they will.)

How are the cops going to decide who’s really waiting for a ride (cabs can take half an hour to arrive on a Saturday night) and who’s just hanging out? Might potential troublemakers just light up a cigarette and thus be free from legal action? It’s hard to see the practical logic here.

Then there’s the provision that would require promoters who hold two or more club events a year to obtain a permit (and presumably, pay a fee). Applicants would have to have proof of $1 million in liability insurance.

That, frankly, would kill a whole lot of small-time events in San Francisco.

Although Newsom complained to the press about "fly-by-night promoters," the city’s full of well-established people who do shows at various clubs with various programs a few times a year or a few times a month — and most of them are small-time operators. Very few have ever had any problems with the law, or promoted a show that led to violence — but most of them would have to shut down, because the $1 million in insurance money would be too expensive.

The Bay Area Reporter suggested March 13 that the bill could harm nonprofit events promoters by forcing them to devote much of the charitable take from their shows to paying for insurance and security plans.

We just don’t see how any of this really addresses the problem of violence outside of San Francisco clubs (and we don’t really see that clubs are to blame for much of the violence in the city anyway). When Sup. Ross Mirkarimi tried to get Mayor Newsom to put cops on foot in high-crime areas, the mayor balked. When Sup. Chris Daly tried to create a violence-prevention program that might have actually gotten to the root causes of this horrible pattern of kids killing one another, the mayor rejected it.

Instead, he wants to create a strange and ineffective plan to give police an excuse to arrest the wrong people that will penalize the small promoters who every week give so much to the city’s cultural landscape.

If club owners are concerned about crowds fomenting violence outside their doors, then the problem needs to be addressed. But this is an ass-backward way to do it. The supervisors need to rip this plan apart and start fresh.

The price of gold

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› news@sfbg.com

Five years ago, the overseers of San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge were facing a $454 million budget deficit. That figure was larger than the gross domestic products of East Timor, the west African country of Gambia, and the Independent State of Samoa.

Investigative reporter Thomas Peele of the Contra Costa Times decided to try and figure out how a bridge in the United States could amass a funding shortfall that dwarfed the economic output of entire nations. For one, he reported in a 2002 story, the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District used money from the tolls paid by motorists to bankroll an expensive transit system that includes a network of buses in Marin County and a fleet of ferry boats that collectively cost millions per year to operate.

Peele also discovered that the bridge’s 19-person board of directors, some members of which live far from the Bay Area, spent more than $56,000 over a two-year period just to cover trips — including meals, rental cars, and hotels — to regular meetings at the Golden Gate’s administrative offices in San Francisco.

The embarrassed district promised reforms and vowed to get its economic house in order.

But five years later, we’ve learned, very little has changed.

The district touts its substantial cuts in overhead, insisting everything possible has been done to avoid raising the toll on motorists. But the Golden Gate Bridge District’s financial problems aren’t going away — and the only solution the administration can come up with is perpetual toll increases.

Even that answer poses huge problems. The bridge doesn’t expect that the actual volume of toll-paying motorists, or the ridership on its buses and ferries, will rise in the near future at the same pace as its expenses, which are largely consumed by employee salaries, benefits, and other perks that the district’s hundreds of workers, including its board members, enjoy.

Public records show today that the district pays for health insurance for 14 of the (very) part-time directors. Last year alone, that insurance combined cost $48,000 — even though several of the board members, including two mayors and four county supervisors, are already eligible for insurance coverage in their home counties.

The bridge district’s projections show vast deficits stretching off into the next decade — and if the problem isn’t solved, a public transit system will be at risk. Riders, among them a high number of business commuters, make 9.4 million annual trips on Golden Gate’s transit system. If the fiscal mess continues unabated, the board will either have to hike tolls to larger numbers ($10, $15, $20?) or start cutting back on the buses and ferries.

The only alternative, says Golden Gate board member and San Francisco supervisor Gerardo Sandoval, may be to ask state lawmakers for the right to change the district’s charter so it can raise money a different way, such as through sales or parcel taxes.

But many of the board members, who benefit from the lucrative sinecure and the power of this bureaucracy, don’t want to take that risk. "Their fear is that if they go to Sacramento, no one’s going to ask them their opinion," Sandoval told us. "The end result is going to be some legislation that significantly changes the way the bridge is run."

BUY A BIB, SAVE A BRIDGE


Bridge officials say the projected deficit was a lot worse five years ago, before they instituted cost-cutting measures. The biggest cuts came in the form of eliminating nearly 200 positions, about a fifth of the workforce. The district also instituted a hiring freeze and forced workers to negotiate wage rollbacks and share more of the costs of their medical coverage.

Bus services from the district’s fleet of 200 were reduced by 22 percent in March and November of 2003, and taking a bus from Marin to San Francisco now costs 34 percent more than it did five years ago. The weekday fare for a ferry from Larkspur to San Francisco was raised a whopping 118 percent, and available ferry seats were reduced 23 percent by cutting trips. It can cost between $7 and $8 one-way to ride Golden Gate’s ferries and buses today.

But over the next five years, the district still anticipates its deficit will reach $91 million.

So after raising the toll five years ago, bridge officials want to do so again as soon as September. Motorists would pay $6 in cash, $5 if using a FasTrak prepaid device, and $3 instead of $1.50 for disabled drivers.

"It seems pretty clear that the [bridge’s] staff is driving the board of directors, and not the other way around, toward infinite toll increases," Sandoval said. "It’s a ludicrous idea, but that’s the only one they have right now."

Earnest bridge staffers point out in reports prepared for the public that they’ve implemented "revenue enhancements," such as putting out a donation box for visitors who might be willing to give up some pocket change and creating special sales programs at the gift shop.

Online trinkets for sale have even been expanded. At Goldengate.org you can purchase a piece of the bridge’s original cable for $175 or an $8 baby bib that reads "Golden Gate Bridge: Big, Strong and Awesome, Just Like My Dad."

But that’s not going to add up to $91 million.

Meanwhile, the anticipated deficit doesn’t even include capital projects like the nearly $185 million the district wants to spend overhauling and replacing its buses and ferries, or the $36 million it hopes to spend over the next 10 years deterring suicides, which are perhaps the second best-known feature of the Golden Gate Bridge after its aesthetic beauty.

And, of course, the bridge constantly needs repainting, thanks to the wind and salt air. "There’s more [required] maintenance on the Golden Gate Bridge than any other bridge in the country because of where it’s at…. It has to be looked after everyday by a crew of ironworkers and painters and whatever else is needed," said board president John Moylan.

The district’s largest operating expense involves paying the remaining 836 full- and part-time workers at the bridge and granting them fringe benefits like insurance coverage and supplemental pensions. This year alone salaries and benefits will cost about $100 million.

THE RED INK MOUNTS


About 60 percent of the district’s budget goes toward keeping its ferries and buses running, but key performance measures show that Golden Gate’s transit system does poorly in three crucial areas, including cost efficiency and effectiveness. When compared with national averages, Golden Gate Transit has one of the top five highest operating costs per "vehicle revenue mile" — a barometer of efficiency — out of the 150 largest transit agencies nationwide, making it more inefficient than BART, AC Transit in Alameda County, and the transportation authorities in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, according to 2005 figures maintained by the federal Department of Transportation.

It’s common for transit systems to rely on government subsidies, and few environmentalists have sympathy for drivers who whine about toll increases from the comfortable interiors of their automobiles. Mass transit is the future of urban living.

"The Golden Gate Bridge may not be as efficient as other comparable systems," Sandoval said, "but if we abandon the investment we have made in mass transportation, it will really leave us with poor options in the years to come."

Alan Zahradnik, Golden Gate’s director of planning, adds that the bridge’s buses and ferries are dissimilar to other transit systems around the country because they tend to carry fewer commuter passengers over greater distances mostly during peak hours compared to transportation authorities like San Francisco’s Muni and AC Transit.

"It’s more expensive to provide suburban, fixed-route transportation," Zahradnik said.

Nonetheless, without an increase in the toll for motorists, the bridge expects to sustain annual deficits for each of the next 10 years until the red ink reaches $290 million.

So it would seem that if the district is asking everyone to tighten their belts, its board of directors should probably do the same. The extraordinarily large 19-member Golden Gate board contains more than twice as many directors as the seven-member board that oversees Muni’s trains and buses and the nine-member board that governs BART.

That’s a throwback to history. When the bridge district formed in 1928, several counties north and south of the span were asked to participate in the $35 million bond issue required to construct a road across the Golden Gate, and although the bonds were paid off decades ago, each of those counties still receives representation on the board.

"There have been attempts to topple the bridge district in the past, but they’re so hard-wired, it’s been impossible," said Susan Deluxe, a Tiburon resident and long-time critic of the district.

The list includes two counties located far to the north, Mendocino and Del Norte — the latter bordering Oregon. But the board’s structure hasn’t been tinkered with since its formation.

When asked whether the far-flung board has outlived its usefulness, the representative from Del Norte County, Gerald Cochran, explained that the distant jurisdictions help diminish tension between the representatives from San Francisco and Marin, who frequently argue over who should contribute more to maintain the bridge. Besides, he said, Del Norte stepped up to help make the Golden Gate Bridge happen in the first place.

"It’s not what we do today," Cochran said, "it’s what we did 75 years ago to get this bridge built. We make our contributions."

The travel expenses of the two directors representing Del Norte and Mendocino counties were the highest board-meeting travel costs he found back when Peele first reported on the board’s budget — $42,404 to cover trips from their home counties to San Francisco for regular board meetings over two years.

In 2002, bridge officials told the public that the district’s top-heavy administration would spend less along with everyone else to save money. The newest $6 toll was proposed "with the understanding that staff will continue to focus on finding internal cost savings," one staff report promised.

But that’s not exactly what new numbers we obtained from the district through a public records request show. Transporting distant directors to district meetings over the past two years cost more than $54,000.

Exasperated district staffers respond that travel for board members to conferences around the globe has already been trimmed and the number of regular meetings they hold in San Francisco were cut to save on the $50 stipends board members traditionally earned per meeting for serving.

A HEALTHY PERK


A majority of the directors receive health insurance coverage from the district, either Blue Shield or Kaiser — a perk that few other part-time boards in the state offer. Last year, that cost $48,000.

But many of the directors already receive coverage from plans in their home counties. The bridge paid $1,200 last year to cover Mike Kerns; he is also a Sonoma County supervisor, where he’s on a second plan that includes life, dental, vision, and health coverage — and costs taxpayers there about $63,000 annually, the clerk of Sonoma County’s board told us. Kerns was on vacation when we called his office at press time.

Board member Albert Boro receives health insurance through the bridge, but taxpayers in San Rafael, where he’s the mayor, pay an additional $19,000 annually to cover him there, according to figures provided by San Rafael’s city manager.

But Boro told the Guardian that the bridge coverage is "secondary and it’s only utilized when my primary doesn’t cover something…. It’s not a premium in the sense that it might be through the city [of San Rafael]."

Three San Francisco supervisors participate in the plan offered here for county employees, which annually costs taxpayers approximately $10,500 per person, according to the controller’s office. But the bridge also covers those individuals. The list includes Tom Ammiano, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval and costs a total of $14,000 to cover all three of them, according to district numbers we requested.

Ammiano said the benefit could be done away with if it truly became a burden on the bridge’s budget. "That would take the will of the board," he said. "[Doing away with it is] not something I would be against, but I can only speak for myself."

Board director Bevan Dufty, also a San Francisco supervisor, declined to sign up for the coverage when he joined the bridge’s board in 2005.

"I had insurance and it seemed duplicative to me … I meet with people every day who don’t have insurance from all walks of life and so I felt fortunate," Dufty said.

Only about 12 percent of the 450 or so special districts that responded to a survey two years ago asking about health coverage said they offered such benefits to their directors or trustees, according to Neil McCormick, head of the California Special Districts Association. The group represents around 900 waste management, utility, fire, and recreation districts across the state. The Golden Gate district is not a member.

The real problem here is that after the district retired its bond debt in 1971, it never came up with an adequate revenue source to cover all of its operating or capital costs. Bridge officials never sought from state lawmakers a mechanism, for instance, to borrow money at a fixed rate, like school districts do.

So what will the bridge do in five more years? Nobody seems to know. According to San Francisco board member Janet Reilly, "That’s the $64,000 question…. There’s only so much toll tolerance among drivers."

New Deal Feted

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By David Carini

The New Deal turned 75 yesterday, March 31st. About 150 people turned out to the Koret Auditorium in the main SF library to mark the occasion and to listen to a six-person panel discuss the series of landmark government initiatives. Supervisors Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi, two authors and two union organizers called for a return to the core principles of social justice and fair treatment that led to such things as minimum wage laws and the formation of social security.

“They did it in the 30’s, we can do it now,” Harvey Smith, adviser to the Living New Deal Project, told the audience. Smith was upset over the potential privatization of the Cow Palace, and joked that the city may sell of chunks of Golden Gate Park soon.

Sup Daly’s main concern was affordable housing and making sure the city represents ordinary people instead of big downtown businesses. “We don’t have enough resources to fund what we need, like schools and hospitals because we give corporations too many tax loopholes,” Daly said.

The panel urged the audience to organize their communities in fighting the privatization of San Francisco, which they said would make this city a haven for the elite. “The New Deal wasn’t just a gift from Congress, workers had to fight for it. If change is going to happen, it will be from the bottom up,” labor activist Karega Hart said.

Home Depot, good riddance

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So Home Depot has pulled out of its plans to build a giant store on Bayshore Boulevard. I hope Gavin Newsom, Sophie Maxwell, Aaron Peskin and all the others who supported this terrible deal are paying attention and get the point: You do business with big national chains and you’re more than likely to get screwed.

It’s the same thing that happened with the mayor’s wi-fi proposal: City officials got all excited about a promise from a big private-sector operator that cares nothing for San Francisco – and when the dollars didn’t add up, the vendor bailed.

In both cases, the deal was bad for the city. Home Depot would have hurt small businesses, brought horrible traffic to nearby neighborhoods and done little for the local economy.

And the whole thing stunk of sleaze: Former mayor Willie Brown began pushing the deal after his political consultant, Jack Davis, was hired by the company to lobby him.

But the supervisors went along with it, by a 6-5 vote (with Peskin casting the swing vote for the chain) – and now the city is back to the drawing board. If the supes had rejected Home Depot, we could be well underway toward creating a community-based alternative for the site.

That’s what Sup. Tom Ammiano wants to start working on now. “We need to get a collaborative effort going to find the proper use for that site,” he told me.

Meanwhile, Newsom is calling Home Depot to make one last push. He wants to company to put its plans on hold, instead of abandoning them. In other words, he’s asking that the site be left empty for as long as Home Depot wants.

Talk about a stupid idea.

Torch debate: still burning

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By Megan Ma

Under pressure to reject any official welcome of the Olympic torch relay when it comes through town on April 9th, SF supervisors plan to vote on two competing resolutions tomorrow, April 1st, that will set the tone for the city’s stance on the controversy.

Board members have been wrangling over wording of potential resolutions for the past few weeks. On March 20th Sup. Chris Daly brought forward a version that called on his colleagues and Gavin Newsom to greet the torch with “alarm and protest at the failure of China to … cease the egregious and ongoing human rights abuses in China and occupied Tibet.”

Daly’s proposal was rejected the same day by Sups. Carmen Chu and Sean Elsbernd, both Newsom allies, who turned around and wrote a much milder version. Their proposal hacks out Daly’s list of grievances against China, and simply states that the city welcomes both the Olympic torch and the Tibetan Freedom Torch, which is slated to arrive a day earlier.

Daly’s offering runs 5 pages longer, and lists a number of China’s alleged human rights abuses, including its role in the Darfur genocide, its abuses against Falun Gong and the Burmese monk protests. He’s re-introducing his version at tomorrow’s meeting.

Dozens of protesters from Students for Free Tibet and Burmese American Democratic Alliance (BADA) lined city hall Friday, saying Tibet sympathizers would be there everyday until the torch arrives. And while the ultimate goal for many activists was for city officials to unanimously boycott the Olympics and reject the torch, UC Davis student Phuntsok Wangden said some would be “satisfied” with the approval of Daly’s “alarm and protest” resolution.

A representative from SF Team Tibet, an umbrella organization for Bay Area protestors, says Desmond Tutu and Richard Gere are scheduled to speak at a candlelight vigil for the Tibetan Freedom Torch on April 8 in the city.

Meanwhile, SFPD still hasn’t released the route of the torch yet.

Closing time

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› amanda@sfbg.com

The sign on the door speaks the truth to the 200 people who pass through it everyday: "Buster’s Place/13th Street Drop-In will be permanently closing Monday March 31 at 5 p.m."

Will, a trim, soft-spoken man seated inside Buster’s on a Monday afternoon, reading a paper and waiting for his laundry to finish spinning, says that starting April 1, "The street is going to be where I go. The Safeway sink is going to be my shower."

Buster’s Place, a homeless services facility run by Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, is on Mayor Gavin Newsom’s midyear budget chopping block. But recently passed legislation says the city must provide a 24-hour drop-in center accessible to anyone. On March 18, the Board of Supervisors, by a vote of 9-2, passed "standards of care" mandating that all city-funded homeless shelters meet a basic level of sanitation and service, stocking facilities with toilet paper, soap, and nutritious food, as well as keeping at least one open 24 hours a day for anyone to walk in the door. (See "Setting Standards," 1/30/08 and "Shelter Shuffle," 2/13/08.)

Newsom tacitly supported the new law, but took issue with the $160,000 price tag — which does not include the $1 million it takes to run Buster’s for a year.

The Human Services Agency plans to temporarily fill Buster’s void with 150 Otis, a city-owned building across the street where storage and shelter reservations are provided for homeless people. In the past, it’s been an emergency shelter for men, but it is only permitted to operate nine months out of the year. On April 1 it will reopen with about 30 beds and 30 to 40 chairs — all for men — and will only be open until June 30, the end of the fiscal year. HSA did not respond before press time to multiple requests for more details on the plan.

Beyond trying to fix a permanent problem with a temporary solution, 150 Otis will be a shadow of Buster’s.

"Buster’s definitely handles more than 30 to 40 people a night," said the Department of Public Health’s David Nakanishi. On March 20, for example, Buster’s staff reported to Nakanishi that 98 people were on-site at 3 a.m. — 90 males and eight females. They also reported 30 people at 3 p.m. and 80 at 8 p.m.; 90 was the average between midnight and 7 a.m. Overall, the staff sees 150-200 people a day.

The drop-in center is often the first place a newly homeless person goes for help. But now those people — especially women — will have one less option.

Buster’s manager, Carolyn Akbar, has been telling clients to go to the Free Clinics’ Oshun Center, which has 24-hour drop-in services for women. But, she said, "A lot of women don’t like to go there because it’s right in the heart of the Tenderloin."

Funding for 150 Otis is coming from an HSA budget surplus. "They’re not saving any money. They said as much at the budget hearing," said Sup. Chris Daly.

Already, other city-funded facilities are feeling the strain of one less helping hand. The Mission Neighborhood Resource Center has many of the same services as Buster’s, but is only open weekdays and already operating at capacity. Still, "I’m seeing my numbers spike up," said director Laura Guzman. Contracted to serve 100 people a day, her staff tries to keep the number under 200, but lately it’s been closer to 250. "We had an incidence of violence last week as a result of more people in the facility," Guzman said. Guzman called drop-in facilities "critical players in our system of care. "When everything else fails, the drop-in is there."

Necessities like showers, laundry, restrooms, telephones, and access to medical and dental services can be found at Buster’s. Also, unlike any of the 15 other city-funded places for homeless people, it’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and is "low threshold," meaning there are no basic requirements to come in.

Nakanishi listed several reasons why a drop-in center aids in overall public health, from preventing deaths on the street to providing a place to take a shower and use the bathroom. A Request for Proposals put out by DPH to continue the 24-hour drop-in services next year is also on hold, shaving a slim million from the city’s budget.

Tenderloin Health, which operates a drop-in center on Golden Gate Avenue, was one of the respondents to DPH’s RFP for a 24-hour center and said it was more than willing to extend operating hours past the current 11:30 p.m. closing time.

"The funding was pulled the same day we submitted the proposal," said Colm Hegarty, director of development for the nonprofit. "We would do it. Our proposal was very specific."

Drop-in centers have been criticized as places where people hang out and avoid the shelter systems and services they provide, but that was never the intention for Buster’s, which has only been open for 13 months. "The program was designed to really have around the clock case management," said Nakanishi, who wrote the RFP.

Akbar said Homeless Outreach Team officers were supposed to be working with center staff to move people deeper into the care system, but she’s been told they’re too busy working with people on the streets.

Which is what Buster’s is all about. Most of the people still on the streets aren’t interested in doing something to change their situations, points out Keith Bussey, deputy director of integrated health services for the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics. "But people who come into a drop-in are in that pre-contemplative stage of change. They’re venturing inside for maybe the first time."

Will is unequivocal about Buster’s proposed replacement: "Not 150 Otis. I don’t want anything to do with 150 Otis because of the people who work there." Claiming he’s received rude treatment there too many times, Will even stopped using the storage facility there. Middle-aged and homeless in San Francisco for the past couple of months, he sleeps outside and after two stays in the city’s shelters said, "Never again."

"Ultimately it’s going to hurt the city," said Hegarty of the closing. "You’ll see more of a presence on the streets. People will want to see something done about it, so there will be more police responding. The criminal justice system is going to become burdened. The emergency room at San Francisco General is going to become burdened. People will go anywhere they can just to get off the streets."

Stop the Cow Palace land grab

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EDITORIAL Technically, the Cow Palace isn’t in San Francisco, but it’s part of the larger city’s history. It was the site of two historic political conventions, a string of historic concerts, and lots of less memorable smaller events. It’s home to the Grand National Rodeo. For a lot of people who care about links to the city’s past, it’s a treasure. For the half-million or so folks who pass through the doors every year, and the dozens of promoters who use the cavernous hall for expositions, shows, and performances that don’t fit anywhere else, it’s an invaluable part of the local cultural scene.

For people who worry about earthquakes and catastrophes, it has immense appeal — the place could serve as a gigantic shelter, with beds, showers, a huge parking lot for staging, and room to land helicopters in the event of a disaster.

To real estate developers, it’s a potential gold mine. And to Daly City, where the Cow Palace sits, it’s an opportunity to create a huge new complex of condos and retail stores that would bring in millions in new taxes.

So when state Sen. Leland Yee introduced a bill that would force the state to declare the Cow Palace surplus property and sell it to Daly City, the battle lines were drawn. A front-page story in the San Francisco Chronicle suggested that the venerable place could be razed for redevelopment. Supporters have come forward to talk about its role in the community and its value as a venue. The Daly City manager, Pat Martel, argued that the place gives her city nothing whatsoever in terms of taxes and hosts some events — like a gun show and the Exotic Erotic Ball — that her constituents find offensive.

What’s missing from most of this debate is the fact that this is 68 acres of prime real estate that’s still publicly owned. Declaring it surplus would almost certainly lead to the privatization of an immense block of potentially priceless urban land.

Yee’s bill, SB 1527, is just the latest chapter in a battle over the Cow Palace that goes back several years. The board that oversees the facility, which reports to the state Department of Agriculture, has been negotiating with Daly City to lease 13 acres of parking lot and underused land for development. That would allow the city to build some new housing, seek a supermarket that the neighborhood badly needs, and add to the local tax base. But the talks have stalled — and after Daly City hired powerhouse lobbyist and former assemblymember Bill Duplissea to take the case to the Legislature, and Daly City’s council asked for help, Yee stepped up.

SB 1527 mandates that the state sell the property to Daly City, with the proceeds going to pay off some of the debt the state incurred through the governor’s misguided deficit-recovery bonds. Yee argues that the state needs the money in this brutal year to save public education, and we understand how powerful that message can be — but selling off public land to cover budget shortfalls is almost always a terrible idea.

There’s little doubt what the endgame is here: Daly City doesn’t have the cash to buy 68 acres that will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars at fair market value. All the small municipality will be is a conduit — the land will be quickly flipped and sold (or leased for very long terms) to private developers.

The Yee bill is designated an "urgency measure," which means it could be approved as early as April. That’s ridiculous; there is no urgency here. This is a huge decision, and needs a lot more public discussion and debate.

We suspect that there’s a way to meet Daly City’s needs for development without turning over the entire 68 acres. There’s almost certainly a way for the Cow Palace to remain and for some of its land to be used for housing and retail.

But we haven’t even seen a template for what sort of project would go on the site. How much of the housing would be affordable? How much of the retail would serve the community? Would this become another chain-store-and-luxury-condo site with gated homes in an economically depressed area? What will the San Francisco neighborhoods that border on the site get out of it? Will there be any new parkland or open space? How will a large commercial complex there affect traffic, noise, pollution, displacement, and other environmental factors in the surrounding areas?

How on earth can you talk about selling off such a huge chunk of public land without even talking about how it will be used?

This is nuts. Yee’s bill needs to be defeated, and all the parties (including the San Francisco city planners and supervisors) need to start cautious, long-term discussions about the Cow Palace, its land, and the needs of the public. Otherwise this will appear — with justification — to be nothing but a sellout of gargantuan proportions.

Mirkarimi for state Senate?

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I just heard a fascinating little rumor that says something about the state Senate race between Carole Migden, Mark Leno and Joe Nation.

Nation’s from Marin and is the more moderate candidate, and some San Franciscans fear that the two more progressive queer legislators could split the SF vote and leave the door open for Nation to win – and for San Francisco to lose a state Senate seat. So a few supporters of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi are saying that he ought to enter the race, as a write-in for the June Green Party primary.

Under the theory here, Mirkarimi would get the Green nomination. If Migden or Leno is the Democrat in the race, he’d drop out. If it’s Nation, he might want to decide to stay in.

Of course, that could mean giving up his board seat, since he’s up for re-election in November, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Perhaps better to have Mirkarimi in San Francisco than Sacramento.

But it shows how concerned people are about the prospect of SF losing this seat.

Mirkarimi was a little startled when he first heard of the plan, which was hatched by supporters who never actually talked to him about it. “I was taken by surprise at how well thought out this became, completely independent of me,” he said. He said he’s running for re-election to the Board of Supervisors, and that’s his priority. But he’s not against the concept of joining the Green Party primary, and if the Democrat were Joe Nation “then I would have to make a decision.”

You got torched

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Reporting by SFBG intern Emma Rae Lierley and SFBG reporter Sarah Phelan

Amid a backdrop of increased bloodshed in Tibet, and an early morning March 20 arson attack on the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, Tibetan supporters gathered last Thursday outside City Hall for a candlelight vigil to protest San Francisco’s April 9 Olympic torch relay.

Inside City Hall, Mayor Gavin Newsom spoke to a semi-circle of news cameras, claiming that hosting the torch brings “pride” to many in the city, including San Francisco’s Chinese community, and stressing that the torch should be seen as a symbol of unity, both for the city and the world.

But during the Olympic Torch’s April 9 relay through San Francisco—its only North American touchdown as it travels from Greece to Beijing—the torch will be run along San Francisco’s waterfront, not through the narrow streets of the city’s Chinatown. And that Tibetan critics of China’s continuing human rights abuses would like to stamp out the torch’s relay through San Francisco entirely, claiming China has stained the flame’s original symbolism

“We, the Tibetans in San Francisco, see the torch as a tainted torch, a Chinese torch tainted in Tibetan blood,” said Tsering Gyurmey, an organizer of the March 20 vigil and an activist with SF TeamTibet, a collection of local organizations.

“The people of San Francisco don’t want the torch,” Gyurmey added. “It’s against the values of the city, against human rights and democracy. This torch comes from the communist Chinese government, where Tibetan people are being killed on their own land.”

A few hours earlier, Gyurmey was one of over a hundred speakers at a Board of Supervisors committee meeting, as Sups. Carmen Chu and Sean Elsbernd, Newsom’s closet allies on the Board, helped strike down a resolution, authored by Sup. Chris Daly, that took a critical stance of China and the Olympic torch.

Public comment lasted over two hours on the item, and was largely in favor of the resolution introduced by Supervisor Chris Daly. Calling for a solemn acceptance of the torch, the resolution asked for the city to receive it with “alarm and protest.”

Supervisor Daly also decried the city’s consideration of “free speech zones,” or special areas where anti-Chinese demonstrations would be limited to during the torch run.

“When our administration was asked to set up these zones, they should have said no,” Daly said during the meeting. “We can not be told to compromise our democracy as we ask others to expand theirs.”

Daly has pledged to try and reinsert his criticisms, when the resolution comes before the full Board on April 2, the week before the Olympic Torch relay is scheduled.

Meanwhile, China has lashed out at US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, calling her a “defender of arsonists, looters and killers” according to international news reports, after she visited the Dalai Lama and criticized Chinese oppression in Tibet.

“If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China’s oppression in Tibet, we have lost our moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world,” said Pelosi. who came out punching when evidence of China’s pre-Olympic crackdown on religious leaders, journalists and lawyers first emerged.

“The Olympic Games in Beijing this summer should provide an opportunity for more free expression, not less,” Pelosi said. MArch 12.

But now US Senator Dianne Feinstein is weighing in on the side of caution, telling the Board of Supervisors not to use the Olympic torch relay to condemn China, claiming that doing so, will make it harder to resolve the Tibet issue.

As for San Francisco’s plan to try to contain protesters in “free speech zones” – located at the start and end of the torch run – Feinstein reportedly doesn’t have a problem with it. That’s the way she handled demonstrations at Democratic National Convention in San Francisco back in 1984 when she was mayor.

FINALLY: T.P. A GUARANTEE

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by Bryan Cohen

We hope. We really hope. After nearly two years of collaboration from a variety of homeless service providers, city officials, and activists, the standards of care legislation for city-funded homeless shelters was finally passed in a quick roll call vote by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, March 18.

The legislation is considered a major victory for homeless rights advocates and groundbreaking for homeless programs across the country. The legislation, sponsored by Supervisor Tom Ammiano and co-signed by Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Gerardo Sandoval, was initiated after investigations by the city’s Shelter Monitoring Committee found many shelters lacking in basic hygiene products. Over half of shelter residents reported some form of abuse during their stays. Key components of the legislation require shelters to provide toilet paper, clean sheets and towels, sanitary bathrooms, and eight hours of sleep a night.

Over the past few weeks the legislation has caused some tension between Supervisors and supporters of the bill and the Mayors office. One of the biggest points of contention was the pricetag of the legislation, initially ballparked at $6 million by the Budget Analyst’s office. However, members of the Standards of Care work group, which wrote much of the legislation, argued the estimates were far too high. In fact, the final bill passed with an estimated $165,000 per year cost to the city.

The legislation also includes a mandate for a 24-hour drop-in center, another departure from Mayor Gavin Newsom’s fiscal priorities. In his recent mid-year de-funding spree, the Mayor pulled Buster’s Place, the city’s only centrally located 24-hour drop-in center. Read this if you want to know why Buster’s is often the only places to go if you’re looking for a shelter bed. While the legislation requires a 24-hour center, it is not clear who will run the center and where.

Supervisors Carmen Chu (District 4) and Sean Elsbernd (District 7) were the only supervisors present who voted against the legislation. Both were appointed to the Board by the Mayor.

Newsom’s commission games

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom didn’t want Debra Walker, an artist and activist, running the Building Inspection Commission. He doesn’t want Theresa Sparks, a transgender woman and community leader, running the Police Commission. And now, we’ve learned, he doesn’t want Robert Haaland, a labor activist and one of the city’s most visible transgender leaders, to serve as vice president of the Board of Appeals.

But of course, the mayor thinks it’s perfectly fine to put two employees of Pacific Gas and Electric Company — an outfit that is suing the city, breaking the law, trying to subvert public power and cheating the public out of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — on city commissions.

This is what the second term of Mayor Newsom, who is now openly running for governor, looks like. It’s not pretty.

We knew the mayor had his sights on higher office, but now that it’s out in the open, almost everything he does at City Hall seems to be aimed not at improving San Francisco but at increasing his odds of moving up in the political world. Why, for example, would Newsom appoint Mary Jung, a PG&E customer services manager, to the Civil Service Commission, and Darlene Chiu, a PG&E City Hall flak, to the Small Business Commission? What possible qualifications could someone whose job involves promoting the interests of a giant corporation that routinely screws small business people have as an advocate for the city’s local merchants? Why would the Civil Service Commission, which deals with city employee issues, need the expertise of someone whose employer wants to prevent the city from creating more public jobs?

Why would Newsom be doing this — if he didn’t need the support of PG&E and its allies for his next political step?

Why would he be directing his appointees to keep out of leadership posts anyone with strong progressive credentials if he weren’t trying to build new bridges to the developers, the big employers, the police unions, and the more conservative interest groups he’ll need for a statewide campaign?

The bottom line is, Newsom needs to stop thinking about running his next campaign and start running the city — because this sort of commission funny business, this practice of treating important agencies that manage key city departments as nothing more than political patronage posts for rewarding allies and punishing enemies, is terrible for San Francisco.

It’s too late to do anything about Mary Jung, but the supervisors can, and should, overturn the Chiu appointment — and let the mayor know that putting PG&E executives on city commissions is unacceptable under any circumstances.

Meanwhile, the Board of Appeals votes for new officers March 19. By tradition, the top posts on the five-member panel rotate based on seniority, with an appointee of the mayor holding one job, and a board appointee the other. But Newsom’s three members have indicated that they won’t allow Haaland — a conscientious commissioner with an excellent record — to serve as vice president. That’s a slap in the face to labor, the queer community, and the supervisors. Newsom ought to show some political integrity and tell his appointees not to suddenly change the rules.

Resistance is futile — or is it?

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Resistance is futile — or is it?

It was a time without precedent in American history. The commander-in-chief voiced his intention to take the country to war — a voluntary, preemptive war with no clear catalyst, no faraway invasion or Pearl Harbor or sinking of the Maine — and millions of people shouted their opposition. With plenty of time to avert war, the protesters warned the invasion would be a costly disaster.

They were right. And it didn’t matter.

The war in Iraq was a test of our democratic ideals. It was a test that this country failed, a failure that has been felt by the people of the United States, Iraq, and elsewhere for the last five years. For many, the refusal of the US government to heed the demands of its citizens left them disillusioned and disempowered.

But others say it sparked a political change that woke up an apathetic citizenry, pulled the Democratic Party back to the left, and may have averted war with Iran.

It’s certainly arguable that the presidential campaign of Barack Obama owes its energy and success in part to the antiwar movement — and if Obama wins, he will be the first president in a long time who took office thanks to the support of a strong grassroots progressive movement.

Nowhere was the clash of people power and government will more acute than on the streets of San Francisco, where a series of massive marches, some drawing nearly 100,000 people, filled the streets prior to the invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003. The onset of war led protesters to effectively shut down the city, resulting in about 2,300 arrests and millions of dollars in costs to the city.

President George W. Bush dismissed the protests, of course, but he wasn’t the only one. Political leaders such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi, then-Mayor Willie Brown and soon-to-be Mayor Gavin Newsom (who didn’t attend any of the marches, unlike progressives on the Board of Supervisors) condemned the peace movement for hurting an innocent city. But with the “battle for San Francisco” making international news, the protesters were more concerned with the global audience.

A month earlier, on the weekend of Feb. 15 and 16, there were coordinated protests against the impending war in about 800 cities around the world, drawing around 10 million people. The peace march in Rome included about 3 million people, earning a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest anti-war rally in history. People have never made such a loud and clear statement against an incipient war.

Beyond the numbers, the antiwar movement was also right. On every major issue and prediction, the messages from the street proved correct while those from the White House were wrong. The US wasn’t welcomed as liberators. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq after the invasion isn’t a stable democracy or shining beacon to anyone but the new generation of jihadis Bush created.

We can blame a hard-headed president, ineffectual opposition party, failure of the national media, or the national climate of fear following Sept. 11. But rather than refighting that lost battle, now is the time to gain perspective on the events of five years ago and determine what it means for democracy and the post-Bush national agenda.

 

TO THE STREETS

There were two main umbrella groups organizing protests before the war: Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW) and International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). ANSWER has remained active and DASW has recently been reconstituted for the fifth anniversary of the war, using direct action in San Francisco as well as other urban centers and outposts like Chevron’s refinery in Richmond, which has reportedly been processing Iraqi oil.

“With the fifth anniversary coming up, we’re going back to direct action on the streets,” said Henry Norr of DASW. “But I don’t have any illusions that it’s going to be like it was five years ago.”

The maddening march to an ill-advised war created a political dynamic in which a broad cross-section of Americans was willing to hit the streets.

“We had a wonderfully diverse group of people, from soccer moms to anarchists,” said Mary Bull, who cofounded DASW, a collective of various affinity groups and concerned individuals formed in October of 2002 as Bush started beating the drums of war.

It was a group fiercely determined to prevent the war — and really believed that was possible. In fact, Bull recalls how she and other members of the group burst out crying at one meeting when a key activist said the war was going to happen.

Richard Becker, who cofounded ANSWER and serves as its West Coast coordinator, said that in the summer of 2002, “we came to the conclusion that [the war] was going to happen.” The group called its first big protest for Sept. 15, 2002, and another one two weeks later. But the movement really exploded on Oct. 26 when almost 100,000 people took to Market Street, much of it a spontaneous popular uprising.

“We were overwhelmed,” Becker said. “We were in a perpetual state of mobilization to keep up with what was going on. But then it didn’t stop the war.”

Did he think they could?

“I think a lot of people thought maybe it was possible to stop it. And we thought maybe it was possible to stop it,” Becker said.

The high point, according to Becker and Norr, was Feb. 17, 2003, when the New York Times ran a front page analysis piece entitled “A new power in the streets” that claimed “the huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” But then Colin Powell went to the United Nations to argue for the invasion, and the Democrats in Congress did nothing, and it became clear war was coming.

Norr stayed out there protesting, being arrested several times and even shot in the leg by Oakland police with a rubber bullet during a protest at the Oakland docks. And he thinks some good came from the experience.

“The lesson for people is the political and economic elites are committed to preserving and extending empire. And they basically say as much in their own writing,” Norr said. “Wars are not anomalies.”

Despite being a frustrating and depressing exercise, most saw benefits to the failed movement. “People got an incredible education about how the system really worked,” Becker said. “Building a movement is mostly about a series of setbacks.”

Medea Benjamin, cofounder of both Global Exchange and CodePink and fixture of the anti-establishment peace movement for years, was upbeat about the protests. “We did our job as citizens. We did what we were supposed to do: organize, get people to take action, get people onto the streets,” she said. “We did everything we could think of.

“What you take from it is we don’t have a very well-developed democracy because the people spoke and the government didn’t listen.”

25war2_Lars1.jpg The ever-evolving “Democracy Wall” on Valencia Street, March 2003, helped stir up debate (Photo by Lars Howlett)

 

FACING ARREST

The collective action of five years ago starts with a series of personal stories — tens of thousands of them — so let me briefly begin with mine.

My arrival in San Francisco was closely tied to the march to war. I was living in Sacramento and working as the news editor of the Sacramento News & Review when Bush began his saber rattling against Saddam Hussein, but by the end of 2002 I had a falling out with my boss and found myself jobless.

Like most Northern Californians who opposed the war, I came to San Francisco on Jan. 18 to make my voice heard and experienced a bit of serendipity on my way to Justin Herman Plaza: while reading the Guardian on Muni, I saw their advertisement for a city editor, a job that was ideal for me at a paper I’ve always loved. Needless to say, it was a great day, empowering and full of possibilities.

Less than two months later I was on the job, and on the second week of that job I was back on the turbulent streets of San Francisco, part of a Guardian team covering the eruption of this city on the first full day of war. When I stepped off the cable car just after 7 a.m., people were streaming up Market Street and I joined them.

When a large group stopped at the intersection of Market and Beale, I stopped too, taking notes and bearing witness to this historic, exciting event. I had a press pass issued by the California Highway Patrol that allowed me to cross police lines, so when police in riot gear surrounded us and threatened arrest, I held my ground with 100 or so protesters.

After interviewing about a dozen people about why they were there and that they hoped to accomplish (see “On the bus: Journalists, lawyers, four-year-olds — the cops were ready to bust anyone Thursday morning“), I was arrested with the others and taken to a makeshift jail and processing center at Pier 27 (no charges were filed in my case, and charges against all of the 2,300 people arrested here in those first few days of the war were later dropped).

I recently tracked down a few of the people who appeared in my article, including Daphne and Ross Miller, who were at the center of the most interesting drama to play out during our standoff with the police. She’s a family practice physician, he’s an architect, and they live in Diamond Heights with their two children, Emet, who is almost 9, and Arlen, 12, who was away on vacation when the war began.

“We were genuinely shocked that the war started,” Ross told me. “We were at some of the earlier protests and really thought there was no way [Bush] could do it.”

They woke up March 20, 2003, to news that the war had begun and immediately walked to the BART station with Emet and rode to the Embarcadero station, not really planning for the day ahead but just knowing that they had to make themselves heard.

“We were pissed as hell. I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry in my life,” Daphne said.

They quickly came up with a plan. “We basically decided that if anyone was going to be arrested, it was going to be Ross and I’d stay with Emet. But it didn’t end up that way and I ended up in the arrest circle.”

Daphne had their house keys and threw them over the police line to Ross at one point. A photographer in the circle had gotten shots of a man named Roman Fliegel being roughed up by police as they pulled him off his bicycle, which was towing a trailer with a sound system, and decided to throw his backpack with camera gear out as well. When Ross — who had four-year-old Emet on his shoulders — caught it and refused police orders to give it to them, police grabbed Emet and roughly arrested Ross, leaving a gash on his forehead.

“Rage surged through the crowd, and it seemed as if things might get ugly, but the police kept a tight lid on the situation, using their clubs to shove back protesters who had moved forward,” I wrote at the time.

Emet was delivered into the circle with Daphne as the arrests continued, many quite rough. “At that point, as a mom, I had to exercise the most restraint ever,” said Daphne, who was angry about the situation but fearful about what she was exposing her son to. “Please, don’t let any violence happen here,” she pleaded with the crowd. Eventually, commanders on the scene let the mother and child go.

“The officer who let me go said that if he saw me again out there, he would call Child Protective Services on me,” Daphne said. But two days later, still brimming with outrage at her country’s actions, she ditched a downtown medical conference to rejoin the street protests, this time solo.

The couple say they’ve lost friendships over the war and have become more engaged with politics, coming to believe that Bush and the neocons are malevolent figures who knew how badly the war would go and did it anyway to establish a large, permanent military base in Iraq.

“Since that day, we’ve been far more active,” Ross said. “We realized you can’t just trust the system. You have to push.”

But that determination was mixed with feelings of disempowerment and depression. They attended some of the protests that following year, but the couple — like most people — just stopped going at some point because they seemed so futile.

“There was a horrible sense of resignation and a genuine depression that followed,” Ross told me.

The nadir was when Bush was reelected and they considered leaving the country. But then, Ross said, “we decided we’re not just going to run away and we’re not going to accept this.” Looking back, even with the scare over Emet, they express no regrets.

“It was the right thing to do because it was the wrong war to have. I’d do it again and again and again if I had to,” Ross said

They’re guardedly hopeful that Barack Obama could begin to turn things around if he’s elected. “I think the right president can at least start to dismantle this,” Daphne said. “I think thousands of people marching in the streets is something he would listen to.”

25war3_Charles1.jpg A die-in on the streets of San Francisco in March 2007 marked the fourth anniversary of the invasion (Photo by Charles Russo)

 

WITNESS TO HISTORY

Covering the peace movement in those early days was a heady experience, like reporting on a revolutionary uprising or working in a foreign country where the people are organized and active enough to be able to shut down society and brave enough to risk bodily injury for their beliefs.

I was at the founding meeting of CodePink — which became the most effective group at personally confronting the warmongers and keeping the war in the public eye — one evening at Muddy Waters in the Mission District shortly after the war started.

Looking back, Benjamin rattled off a long list of the alliances the group built — with labor, churches, businesses, and a wide array of social movements — and creative actions intended to build and demonstrate popular support for ending the war.

“We’ve done so many things and what did we get? We got a surge,” she said. “It shows the crisis in our democracy, the crisis of the two-party system, the crisis of a dysfunctional opposition party.”

Yet she said the peace movement has been remarkably successful in convincing the public that the war was a mistake and that it’s time for the troops to come home, even if the Democrats have been slow to respond to that shift.

“The progress we’ve made is turning around public opinion and that’s going to play a big role in the upcoming elections,” she said. For Norr, the role of the news media is a particular sore spot. He was a technology reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle who called in sick on the first full day of war and was arrested on Market Street with his wife and daughter, resulting in suspension by editor Phil Bronstein for his actions.

I wrote several stories on the issue, which culminated in Norr being fired and Bronstein unilaterally banning Chron employees from peace protests. I even borrowed CodePink’s guerilla tactics when Bronstein repeatedly refused to return my calls or address why he had singled out antiwar protesters for uniquely punitive treatment. I confronted him during a speech he gave at the Commonwealth Club (see “Lies and half-truths,” 5/7/03). That was the tenor of the times: we were all tired of being lied to and we decided to push back.

Norr was particularly frustrated with his own paper’s reporting of the war and started sending articles by the foreign press to his paper’s news desk, trying to wake his colleagues up to the pro-war propaganda being passed off as journalism in this country.

He was also disappointed with the country and with the Chronicle — both the management and his fellow reporters, who did little to support him — but the experience caused him to return to his roots as a progressive activist.

“The war and losing the job and everything brought an abrupt end to my consumerist phase and dumped me back into the world of being an activist,” said Norr, who serves on the KPFA 94.1 FM local station board and has made three recent trips to the Palestinian territories while working with the International Solidarity Movement.

Benjamin said Americans shouldn’t expect the next president to end the war — not without lots of pressure from a renewed and vocal peace movement. “This is the time to set the stage for the post-Bush agenda,” Benjamin said. “Don’t put your hopes in Barack Obama in getting us out of Iraq. Put your hopes in the people.”

25war4_Lane1.jpg A rally and nonviolent direct action at the Richmond refinery targeted Chevron on March 15 (Photo by Lane Hartwell)

 

THE AFTERMATH

The San Francisco Police Department, which spent more than $2 million on overtime costs responding to peace protests between March 15 and April 16, 2003, generally behaved with restraint and professionalism, but there were several exceptions.

The most costly and disturbing incident came when Officer Anthony Nelson began aggressively swinging his long riot baton at protesters, badly shattering the arm of peaceful protester Linda K. Vaccarezza, who suffered a permanent disability in her career as a court reporter.

Nelson’s incident report falsely stated that Vaccarezza had threatened him with a sign attached to a solid pole, but video of the incident later clearly showed there was no pole and that she was retreating when he teed off on her (see “The home front,” 05/19/04).

Vaccarezza received an $835,000 settlement from the city in November of 2004. On Oct. 5, 2005, two and a half years after the incident, SFPD fired Nelson for lying about what happened that day, and the City Attorney’s Office has been successfully fighting Nelson’s appeals in court ever since, putting in more than $100,000 in attorney time and costs into the Nelson and Vaccarezza cases.

The other significant ongoing litigation from the antiwar protests involved Mary Bull, who was arrested during an early protest for pouring fake blood in front of the entrance to Chevron’s San Francisco office before being allegedly strip searched and left naked in her San Francisco Jail cell for 36 hours.

Ironically, Bull was among those who brought a successful class action lawsuit against Sacramento County after she and others protesting a logging plan were strip searched, setting a precedent and led most counties to reform their strip-search policies. She used her share of the $15 million judgment to buy an organic permaculture farm in Sebastopol.

Her San Francisco case, in which Bull won a multimillion-dollar judgment, is still under appeal and now in mediation. Bull said the protests five years ago did make a difference, something she tells those who fret about its apparent failure. “I tell them to look at what issues the candidates are talking about now and I thank them for protesting then.”

“Even though we had millions throughout the world, we were sort of blocked, but now we’re regaining that momentum,” Melodie Barclay, a massage therapist who was also arrested with me on the first day of the war, told me recently. “We can’t judge it by the fact that we didn’t get the momentum we wanted.”

Norr started his antiwar activism working with Students for a Democratic Society in Boston, protesting the Vietnam War, which he said shares many similarities with the current situation, for good or for ill. He said that people tend to forget that while the protests then were huge and helped end the war, the movement did wane after Nixon ended the draft and substituted massive aerial bombardment for boots on the ground.

“The protests dropped off considerably,” he said. “A lot of the things that drove people to take risks in the late ’60s had faded by the early ’70s.”

He thinks the current administration learned a lesson from those days: it’s easier to maintain a war effort if the average citizen isn’t affected.

But there are other factors as well keeping a lid on the antiwar outrage.

“The culture has changed too. Young people are oversaddled with debt. People in schools seem to be docile. The culture as a whole seems to be more individualist and consumerist,” Norr said.

Yet some young people have woken up and many of them are funneling their energies into a peace group that was formed in the summer of 2005: World Can’t Wait, as in: the world can’t wait for the end of Bush’s second term before we change our direction and leadership.

“We don’t just want them gone, we need to repudiate their program,” said Giovanni Jackson, a 26-year-old WCW student organizer. “If we’re going to change anything, we need the youth.”

Jackson was at WCW’s founding convention in New York City, which came just as New Orleans was being flooded and then essentially abandoned by the federal government.

“When [Kerry] lost, people felt demoralized and World Can’t Wait kind of stepped into that situation,” Jackson said. “There was a lot of demoralization in the antiwar movement at that time.”

The group organized protests and student walkouts on Nov. 2, 2005.

“Everyone has their moments of doubt,” he said, “but I’m motivated by the crimes we see everyday.”

 

THE LESSONS

One of the biggest barriers to galvanizing people and turning the fifth anniversary of the war into something that might make a difference is the presidential election, which is diverting the energy of many potential protesters — and at the same time, offering some hope that a new president may lead to peace.

After all, every single one of the Democratic presidential candidates has promised to withdraw troops from Iraq, with varying timelines and numbers of US personnel left behind. And with enough encouragement, they might be willing to help change the status quo.

Many of the activists who volunteered their time and money to help move the Obama campaign into its front-runner position came out of the antiwar movement, and Obama’s strong stand against the war has been a key factor in his popularity.

Becker and some other activists don’t have much faith that a change in presidents will change the course in Iraq, although he agrees that much of the energy now surrounding Barack Obama derives directly from the antiwar movement.

“There’s been a huge upsurge of hope for Obama and that he might bring about the kind of change we need,” Bull said, adding that she doesn’t share that hope, believing the only path to peace is to pressure Obama and other leaders to commit to more progressive positions.

Norr said, “On one level, people have illusions about the power of peaceful protests. People believe in democracy, as well they should. We feel like the rulers should be paying attention to public opinion.

“It’s a remarkable story how broadly and quickly the American people have turned against the war. Public opinion was certainly ahead of the Democrats.”

And people will only grow more disenchanted with Iraq and its multitude of costs. “The people here are paying for this war, and everyday we have new stories about health clinics being shut down,” Becker said.

Becker was amazed last March as massive demonstrations for immigrant rights seemed to explode out of nowhere. “We think there will be more things like that,” he said.

Because after five years of organizing communities to resist the military-industrial complex’s plans, Becker thinks there’s been some visible progress.

“There isn’t a town or hamlet in the US that doesn’t have activism going on, but you wouldn’t know it from the corporate media,” Becker said. “It’s a mistake for people to feel discouraged.”

Newsom to small business: Drop dead!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

And so Mayor Newsom, who wants to run for governor when he still hasn’t learned to manage the city as mayor,
has bestowed the ultimate insult to small business in the City and County of San Francisco.

He has named a City Hall lobbyist for PG@E to the Small Business Commission.

Yes, you read correctly, Mayor Gavin Newsom has appointed Darlene Chiu, a PG@E lobbyst in City Hall, to the SBC.

How in the world does a company that has been screwing small business for decades inside and outside City Hall, stealing our cheap Hetch Hetchy public power for decades and forcing small business and residents to buy its expensive private power, yanking upwards of $650 million a year out of the city’s economy with its high rates, corrupting City Hall for decades with its lobbying muscle, qualify as a member of the Small Business Commission?

We put the issue in a diplomatic question and emailed it to the mayor. His press secretary, Nathan Ballard,
issued this statement this afternoon on Chiu’s glowing qualifications:

“Darlene Chiu was appointed to replace Florence Alberts after her term expired. Darlene has first hand knowledge of the challenges facing small businesses in San Francisco. She grew up working in her family’s these retail businesses in Chinatown, managing nine to l5 employees. She will also bring her knowledge of City government and communications to the Commission, which will be important to the successful operations and promotion of the assistance center.” (As one small business leader told me, “I don’t recall in the requirements of being on the commission that growing up as a child of small business owners quite meets the criteria.”)

No, no, no: PG@E is placing Chiu, via Newsom, on the SBC to help PG@E continue to facilitate the “successful operations and promotion” of further PG@E corruption in City Hall to protect its illegal private power utility in San Francisco. The supervisors can and should move quickly to reject the PG@E appointment.

More: Newsom to the Civil Service Commission: Drop dead. He appointed Mary Jung, a PG@E customer services manager, to the Civil Service Commission.

Meanwhile, as he further cemented PG@E power inside City Hall, he whacked three well qualified and conscientious commissioners: Debra Walker, an artist and activist, from heading the Building Iinspection Commission, Theresa Sparks, a transgender woman and community leader, from running the Police Commission, and Robert Haaland, a labor activist and one of the city’s most visible transgender leaders, from serving as vice president of the Board of Appeals.

Newsom is running for higher office and, as our editorial in tomorrow’s Guardian puts it, “almost everythihg he does at City Hall seems to be aimed not at improving San Francisco but at increasing his odds of moving up in the political world…Why would Newsom be doing this–if he didn’t need the support of PG@E and its allies for his next political step.

“Why would he be directing his appointees to keep out of leadership posts anyone with strong progressive credentials if he wasn’t trying to build new bridges to the developers, the big employers, the police unions and the more conservative interest groups he’ll need for a statewide campaign?” B3

Freedom of Information: More sunshine — easily and at no cost

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› news@sfbg.com

Imagine sitting at home — or in your office, or in your favorite café — and listening in on what are now secret, backroom policy discussions and decisions in the San Francisco mayor’s office. Imagine having access to an immediate transcript of the talks. Imagine being able to read internal e-mail discussions among city staffers about issues that affect you — without ever filing a public records request. In fact, imagine never having to file another written request for public documents; imagine just going to a city Web site, entering a search term, and finding all of the records yourself.

Imagine filing a complaint with a city agency and tracking the issue, minute by minute, as it works its way through the system.

Imagine listening on your cell phone to any policy body as it meets in city hall.

All of this is possible, today. Much of it is not only consistent with but actually required by local law. And it won’t cost the city more than a modest amount of money.

Transparency is a common buzzword during this presidential campaign; the Barack Obama campaign has even issued a white paper describing policy and technological ways to embrace it. He’s talking about live Internet feeds of meetings about significant issues involving executive branch appointees as well as for those of regulatory departments (a program that would go far beyond what you see on C-SPAN).

So there’s no reason San Francisco can’t take the lead in using technology — generally simple, off the shelf, existing technology — to dramatically increase sunshine at City Hall and public participation in local government.

Proposition G, the city’s 1999 sunshine law, mandates that San Francisco use "all technological and economical means to ensure efficient, convenient and low cost access to public information on the Internet." Here are five easy ways to do that:

1. Fully adopt the voyeur concept for city meetings. This is the idea that the public should be able to observe and engage in government decision making — all government decision making.

All policy meetings in City Hall should at the very least be broadcast as audio on the Web and available via phone teleconference. In other words, the meetings should be streamed online, and that stream should be accessible by calling a free conference line. This is already standard practice in the business world and is working well for many investors in public companies that disclose financial information in compliance with Securities and Exchange Commission rules. It can be done for little or no cost with services like blogtalkradio.com, skype.com, freeconferencecalls.com, and webex.com.

Today only a limited number of public meetings are broadcast, mostly because the only outlet is SFG-TV and resources are limited. But audio streaming is a no-brainer — there’s no need for a staffer to control cameras, the microphones are already set up, and these days just about every room has a speakerphone.

Currently, the SFG-TV video coverage isn’t posted on the city’s Web site, sfgov.org, until two or three days after a meeting. That’s too long; the audio should be made immediately available online. And the Internet URL and dial-in options should be listed on the meeting agenda so that news media and citizen bloggers can instantly refer back to the URL with timecodes to point out specifics, and include them in their stories and blog postings.

With streaming, you can follow along in real time when you are stuck at home taking care of a sick relative, or at the office listening with headphones, or you are disabled and can’t cross town to attend in person.

The city already has a great contract for real time captioning — the text you see at the bottom of the screen for video. It’s not 100 percent accurate, but it’s pretty decent. That could be expanded to cover streaming audio, and the text could be computer translated (or translated by bilingual typists) into other common languages. The advantage of media integrated with RTC is that specialized search engines like blikx.com and everyzing.com can be used to find relevant phrases and begin playback directly at that spot. And transcriptions can be posted online in real time (somewhat like live blogging!) so that if you are late for a meeting you can quickly scan what has already transpired, and by the end of the meeting you will effectively have a draft of minutes. That saves a lot of staff time and provides an immeasurably more useful historic record.

Today, video recordings of city meetings can’t be downloaded — the only way to review it or post a clip to YouTube is to order a $10 DVD, which arrives a week after you send a check (and no, they don’t take PayPal). And while many other city meetings make audio recordings, you have to pay $1 for an audio tape and pick it up during business hours or pay more for postage. They all should be available as free podcasts.

The SFG-TV video shows more than just the speakers and officials; there are other angles, and they ought to be available too. It’s important to know who attended the meeting but never said anything, who greeted whom, and even who ignored whom.

2. Let the public do the broadcasting. All City Hall meeting rooms should provide wi-fi (and electrical outlets), and the system ought to have enough speed to allow bloggers or activists to upload high-quality video broadcasts of meetings that SFG-TV can’t afford to cover. It can be done using existing services like Justin.tv, Upstream.tv, and live.yahoo.com. This would also allow live blogging — and let people preparing to testify on an issue have access to the Web to do research on the spot. If the room had a projector and a screen, people who were unable to attend the meeting could still comment, either through video or just by posting text messages that the decision makers could read.

The audio broadcasting of meetings should be expanded to include all meetings between the mayor (or supervisors) and city staff. The law already requires public access to so-called passive meetings — those between the mayor or department heads and outside parties that influence city policy.

3. Make public most city emails and other documents as soon as they are produced.

San Francisco city employees produce thousands of records a day — e-mails, memos, reports, etc. — and the vast majority of them are and should be public record. But many are deleted and others never see the light of day. When a member of the public asks for all the records on a topic, just finding those documents can be a sizable task.

But it’s technologically simply to solve that problem: every time a city employee produces a document, the computer system should automatically send a back-up copy to a public web server. That way nothing would get lost or erased, and anyone looking for public information could simply go to that site and search for it him or herself.

For e-mails sent by city staff, one way might be to CC (carbon copy) an online message board (for example Google or Yahoo groups, which would be available at no cost to the city). Other approaches for instant messages, text messages and voicemails could be adopted as well. The Palo Alto City Council is already doing something like this for a narrow collection of e-mails (although not in real time).

We all know there are some city communications that must remain private or be redacted — for example Attorney Client discussions or human-resource conversations regarding personnel. But there are simply ways to make sure those stay confidential: one approach might simply have the user tick a flag or answer a Yes/No Possible Redaction popup when the message is sent. Certain employees — like the people who handle sensitive employee health records and certain litigators in the city attorney’s office — could have software that defaults to a confidential server.

The added advantage, of course, is that the computers could also make a record of the title and date of every confidential document — and that information could be made public. If a dispute arose over whether the city was improperly withholding records, the public would at least know that certain documents existed.

All city files could be stored on network drives (not on local drives) with one location for default public files that would not allow overwriting or deletions and would be mirrored to a Web server and another drive for the few that may require redaction first.

4. Save all the old records. After a very embarrassing lawsuit that is threatening the Missouri governor’s job, that state in January adopted an email retention system that preserves all email for at least seven years (based on federal requirements for financial records). And e-mail/instant message/text/fax retention systems are standard practice now in the financial industry (Morgan Stanley lost a $1.45 billion judgment because the company failed to preserve e-mail).

In fact, we all know storage continues to get cheaper and smaller — so San Francisco should abolish any retention timeframes for electronic records and keep them all into the foreseeable future. The world-famous Internet Archive is right here in the Presidio: I suspect that group would love to archive all the city information, and keep it online, free and forever.

When paper documents are part of the public record, they should be scanned and converted to text and posted within two days. This would include discussions between staff and individual members of policy bodies and the creation of the draft agenda and supporting materials as they are obtained.

All these methods would significantly reduce the number of public records requests to the city staff and thus save the city money.

5. Make calendars public — and keep communications public. Mayor Gavin Newsom won’t provide detailed daily calendars — even after the fact, when there is no possible security reason for keeping his workday itinerary secret. All top officials should post their calendars on the web so the public can track what they are doing.

The city needs to adopt a global policy that city business should be performed on city devices (computers, email accounts, phones) whenever possible — and when city employees or officials use their own computers or hand-held communications tools, those should be forwarded immediately to the city system and made public.

San Francisco has one of the best local Sunshine laws in the country — and at a time when activists at every level are looking for ways to use technology to expand public access, the city should be in the forefront. All it takes is some political will.

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Here are some more ways that the city could use technology to improve public access:

1. Use a program like govtrack.us to follow legislative changes.

2. Explore ways to bring nonprofits that perform traditional government services under sunshine laws.

3. Significantly improve the city’s Crimestats system (more real-time allow alerts for crimes near you) – google mashup et al. See http://chicago.everyblock.com/crime/

4. Embrace e-rulemaking technology – similar to federal rulemaking use technology to get ideas online and generate more participation for those who can’t show up in a meeting.

5. Require the Police Department to issue press credentials to bloggers.

6. Fund a few open-government lawsuits to expand the boundaries on access to public records (the law provides for attorney’s fees if the suit is successful).

7. Require city agencies to post the method for obtaining public records online. Require posting of all negative determinations on home pages.

8. At budget time, mandate that each agency provide statistics as determined by SOTF on sunshine responsiveness.

9. Require an assessment of sunshine compliance as a mandatory item for all Financial/Management audits.

10. Televise SOTF and Ethics Commission formal hearings.

11. Require active Ethics investigative files to be open.

12. Embrace fully the much-improved but incomplete example of posting online all interactions as part of large contract negotiations – as was partially done with TechConnect.

13. Host accounts payable/receivables online with the scanned images of invoices paid.

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Freedom of Information: Sunshine experiment in Palo Alto

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The Palo Alto City Council is conducting a unique experiment in its efforts to comply with the Ralph M. Brown Act, which requires government bodies to conduct business in a public way.

Palo Alto now posts e-mails from council members on the city’s Web site (www.cityofpaloalto.org/council), providing easy access to all with Internet capabilities. The e-mails were first posted online following a 2003 settlement of a Brown Act lawsuit against the city of Palo Alto by two local newspapers — Palo Alto Weekly and The San Jose Mercury News.

Eight private e-mails were in question, disclosing the votes of a closed city council session, and while the city never admitted guilt in vioutf8g the Brown Act, language in the settlement established the practice of posting council e-mails on the Web site and making them available in council agenda packets prior to meetings.

Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, questions the merits of the system.

"Some people would look at this and think it is a giant and serial violation of the Brown Act — but I wouldn’t necessarily say that," Scheer told the Guardian, noting that the prohibition on serial meetings bans such an approach. But he said that this is an interesting experiment, as long as council members don’t deliberate by e-mail. But assistant city manager Emily Harrison told us the messages avoid Brown Act violations by sticking to basic questions about agenda items, which the public can scrutinize.

The city of San Francisco has no such system in place, and e-mails to and from the Board of Supervisors is available only through direct request. Frank Darby, the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force administrator, said that the city had never looked into putting one in place.

"We are not required to post e-mails [under the Sunshine Ordinance]," Darby said. However, he added, the city "constantly monitors" itself to ensure that it is in accordance with the Sunshine law. "There may be some people who disagree and feel that maybe we should put every e-mail online — but currently the Sunshine Ordinance does not require that e-mails be made available online."

Sunshine in the digital age

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EDITORIAL The California Public Records Act needs an update. So does the state’s Brown Act, which mandates open meetings of government bodies, and the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance. These are the landmark laws that keep government from operating in secret — but all were written long before the explosion of information technology profoundly changed the way city, state, and local agencies compile, sort, process, present, and preserve information.

And now, with agencies at every level trying to use information technology to hide data from the public and courts struggling with laws that didn’t anticipate the modern era, open-government advocates need to be working on every level to protect and expand access.

As we point out in this issue, technology can be used to spy, to hide, and to obfuscate — but it can also be used to make the operations and processes of the public sector far more open and accessible. Properly used, today’s information technology can vastly improve the way governments work — and it’s neither difficult nor expensive to make that happen.

The state Legislature, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and the Sunshine Task Force should be looking at ways to make sure that computers don’t increase secrecy — and to take advantage of the opportunities modern technology offers.

The Brown Act, passed in 1954, forbids public agencies from meeting in secret, except in very limited circumstances. The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance goes further. The laws have been interpreted to mean that the members of a board or commission can’t use e-mail to discuss pending business; that would amount to a closed-door meeting. That same interpretation ought to apply to members participating in discussions on, say, a Yahoo! news group. Deliberations on a policy matter would be taking place outside of public view.

But what if the public was invited? What if a virtual discussion took place before or between traditional meetings — and any member of the public could log in from anywhere (work, home, the public library, terminals in City Hall) and watch? What if people — who are now allowed only a minute or two to comment in public meetings — were able to post longer, more detailed comments that policymakers would see during online discussions? What if the entire record of that meeting were instantly available on the Web, in a searchable form?

Would that be an increase in public access? What about the large number of people who still don’t have computers or Web access — would they be left out?

That’s just one of the questions sunshine advocates are talking about. Legislators need to be addressing the issues, too.

As Kimo Crossman reports on page 14, increasing public access doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive — in fact, there are ways to save the city money. One obvious idea: almost every document that’s produced by a city employee, including e-mail, is already considered a public record. Why not simply program the computers to make an instant copy of everything and post it to a public Web site? That way someone looking for memos from, say, the Public Utilities Commission addressing solar energy could simply search that site with those key words and come up with all of the records quickly.

That would save time for journalists and citizen watchdogs who now have to request those records from the agency — and it would save money for the city. If the documents were all searchable for anyone, there would be no need to spend time and money responding to public-records requests.

It wouldn’t be hard at all to add a "possibly confidential" key to records, preventing documents that really should remain secret from going into the public file. And the computers could automatically generate a list of the documents being withheld, so the public could find out what records are remaining out of view.

Over time, old paper records could be scanned and put on the site, too. And with electronic storage so cheap these days, there’s no reason why all public records can’t be preserved in an accessible form and location.

The County of Santa Clara a few years back began putting together a valuable data trove that included all of the county’s real estate and property ownership records. That allowed for the creation of a geographic information system that could be used to track property sales, taxes, crime rates, building permit applications, and much more. A wonderful public service — except that the county didn’t offer it to the public. The data was for sale, for more than $100,000 a license.

It took a lawsuit by the California First Amendment Coalition to force the county to back off and make the data public. But that’s just an example of a trend that’s cropping up all over the country: governments are developing ways to make more use of information — and then are trying to copyright it, sell it, and make money.

The problem with that, as attorney Rachel Matteo-Boehm, who handled the CFAC case, points out, is that it segregates access to information by wealth. The rich get the tools of technology to understand and use public data; the poor don’t.

It’s a dangerous trend and the Legislature should address it right away. Information created by public agencies using public data should be public — no excuses, no exceptions. And if the software that makes it easy to process that information is created by the public sector (or under contract to the public sector) the public needs free access to it.

The Legislature also needs to shoot down a series of attempts by the secrecy lobbyists to cut off access to new types of data. A bill now before the Assembly, AB 1978 by Assemblymember Jose Solorio (D-Anaheim), would exempt certain types of information from the Public Records Act. The bill appears to be aimed at overturning the Santa Clara decision but could also address an issue that has come up in San Francisco: that of so-called metadata in public documents.

Metadata is embedded information that may be in a file that doesn’t appear when the file is printed out. The City Attorney’s Office has been arguing that metadata isn’t public. That’s nonsense — it’s part of a public document, created at public expense by public employees. The Legislature needs to reject this bill — and instead pass a law that would specifically require agencies to release any internal data that’s created as part of a public record.

The San Francisco Sunshine Task Force is in the process of updating and improving the city’s landmark law, and it should seek to incorporate some of the suggestions above.

The Task Force also needs to be sure that the amendments to the law give that oversight body the teeth it needs to enforce public-access requirements. Far too often, city officials simply ignore task force findings, and, as Sarah Phelan reports on page 17, the Ethics Commission and the district attorney rarely follow up with sanctions.

For starters, the task force should have the right to subpoena documents and witnesses (without first asking the supervisors for approval — a cumbersome process). The panel should have its own full-time legal counsel. It should also have increased enforcement power: while giving the task force the right to levy fines and sanctions is politically tricky, a provision that allows the task force to order the release of documents — backed up with the full support of the City Attorney’s Office — ought to be part of the final package.

Progressive power play for the DCCC

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The word from the San Francisco Elections Office is that all hell has broken loose as the city’s top progressive political leaders file to run for the Democratic County Central Committee in a bold and surprising move to seize control of the political body from moderates like Mayor Gavin Newsom, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. And the word is that Team Newsom was caught flat-footed, able to get only a couple administration loyalists — Mike Farrah and Catherine Dodd — to file before today’s 5 p.m. deadline.

But the lineup on the left is a who’s who list of top progressives: supervisors Chris Daly, Jake McGoldrick and Aaron Peskin, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, school board members Eric Mar and Kim-Shree Maufis, likely supervisorial candidates Debra Walker and Eric Quesada, mayoral runner-up Quintin Mecke, and McGoldrick’s son Jamie. If elected, they would join incumbent progressives such as Robert Haaland, Michael Goldstein, and Rafael Mandelman.

“I think what you’ll see is a more progressive central committee,” said Bill Barnes, chief of staff for Assembly member Fiona Ma and a progressive member of the DCCC who is also running for reelection.
Control of the DCCC would allow local progressives, most of whom have endorsed Barack Obama for president, to take advantage of the opportunity to push a more innovative political agenda and try to pressure the party to move to the left.

They are also likely to use a coordinated campaign this year to present progressive policy options to San Franciscans just as Newsom is working to sell a Lennar-sponsored development proposal on the June ballot and using a power grab on city committees to try to take control of the public agenda.

Has Newsom lost his mind?

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It’s one thing for Mayor Gavin Newsom to bash the Board of Supervisors, something we’re likely to see a lot of this year as he angles to get a few more allies on the board this fall. But it’s quite another thing for the city’s top elected leader to urge his business community buddies to sue the city, which is just downright irresponsible and could even be considered official misconduct. And how ironic is it that little miss civility, Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, is beating the drum for the most uncivil of acts, a civil lawsuit against a city that’s she’s taken an oath to serve and protect. Have these people lost their minds?
Maybe so, because this latest outrage comes just two days after Newsom took a facts-be-damned approach to pushing tidal power, which a study concludes would be an expensive and inefficient boondoggle, but Newsom wants to do anyway, probably because it would make such a whiz-bang press release. His quote to the Chron was priceless: “I don’t care about the arguments against it. I care about the arguments for it.”
George W. Bush couldn’t have said it better himself.

Chemicals and quarantines

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› sarah@sfbg.com

As the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) pushes ahead with plans to aerially spray the Bay Area with pheromones to eradicate the light brown apple moth (LBAM), the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has signed onto state senator Carole Migden’s efforts to ask CDFA to put a moratorium on the spraying.

"We haven’t seen this level of concern and debate since the medfly days of then governor Jerry Brown," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian. "At this point, spraying sounds premature and reckless, even though I understand this is a nasty invasive pest."

Meanwhile, four members of the California State Assembly, including San Francisco’s Mark Leno, are working collaboratively on a group of LBAM-related measures to address health, scientific, and efficacy issues that remain unresolved since the agency’s multimillion-dollar eradication campaign began last year.

Leno’s part in this collaboration with fellow assembly members John Laird, Loni Hancock, and Jared Huffman involves demanding that CDFA complete an environmental impact report (EIR) before being able to apply pesticide in an urban area for LBAM eradication, which can be a lengthy process.

"By making this an urgency measure, it would take immediate effect," Leno told the Guardian. "We recognize that urban areas are concerned about health and safety, that LBAM is a real threat to the agricultural industry, and that the other side must be considered."

Last year, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and CDFA both gave LBAM emergency status after the tiny, leaf-rolling Australian native was found in a Berkeley backyard, the first time it was confirmed in the continental United States.

As the USDA’s Larry Hawkins told the Guardian, the federal declaration of emergency allowed his department to access the Commodity Credit Corporation, a federally owned and operated entity within the USDA that supports and protects farm income and prices.

So far, the USDA has allocated $90 million to cover the costs of what Hawkins called "an expensive regulatory program," along with those of developing suitable pesticides and a nationwide survey to see if the moth has spread beyond California.

Hawkins claims the state separately declared an LBAM emergency — a move that allowed CDFA to go ahead and abate the pest — and that impacted the state’s normal EIR process.

"Emergency status doesn’t relieve [CDFA] of EIR requirements, but it allows them to do it simultaneously," Hawkins explained.

Since then some citizen activists have challenged the moth’s emergency status, claiming that there is no evidence that LBAM has severely damaged or infested local crops. But Hawkins says this purported lack of evidence proves that the government’s eradication program is working.

"We know the insect exists, that it destroys crops in other countries, and now you find the same insect here," said Hawkins, whose department has predicted that LBAM could inhabit 80 percent of the United States and nibble on 2,000 plant species.

"So, we can logically conclude it will cause damage here. The reason you haven’t seen major damage here is because we’ve found it early enough to deal with it before it becomes substantial. And the reason you won’t find reports of major LBAM damage in New Zealand or Australia is because they are constantly using pesticides," Hawkins said.

Asked if the USDA will fully disclose the ingredients of any product the state plans to use aerially, Hawkins said, "We cannot force a private company to reveal all their ingredients. But we have told all those companies that hope to provide products that they should expect to reveal them all."

Critics of the state’s pheromone spraying program observe that Suterra LLC, which manufactured the spray used over Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, refused to release the full ingredients until it was sued — and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger demanded immediate full disclosure.

These same critics also note that Schwarzenegger, who continues to support CDFA’s LBAM-eradication program, received $144,600 in campaign contributions from Los Angeles–based Roll International owners Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who control Suterra, Fiji Water, Paramount Agribusiness, and the Franklin Mint.

Records show the Resnicks donate broadly, mostly to Democrats — including the gubernatorial campaigns of Steve Westly and Phil Angelides, and US Sens. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama — with a lesser-size donation to Republican presidential front-runner John McCain, proving they play both sides of the fence.

With researchers testing a variety of LBAM-related products in New Zealand, Hawkins hopes to have a product formulated for California by June 1, which is when spraying is scheduled to resume in Santa Cruz and Monterey; spraying in the Bay Area is set for Aug. 1.

"We would like to give communities maximum notice, but we’re also working towards a beginning-of-June date, and as much as we’d like to insert artificial time frames, the insect couldn’t care less. It’s on a biological time table and is multiplying every day," Hawkins said.

David Dilworth of the Monterey nonprofit group Helping Our Peninsula’s Environment, which advocates the use of targeted pheromone-baited sticky traps, conceded that even if CDFA was forced to stop the aerial spraying, the USDA could spray anyway.

"But it would take them several months to organize, and we don’t believe they have the constitutional power," claimed Dilworth, whose organization is preparing a 60-day notice of intent to sue the USDA and the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Meanwhile, organic farmers find themselves in an uncomfortable limbo that continues to shift. Take the Santa Cruz–based California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF). Last fall, CCOF supported the aerial pheromone spray after the National Organics Program approved it, meaning sprayed farmers didn’t lose organic certification

But March 4, CCOF spokesperson Viella Shipley told the Guardian that the group is about to release a revised position on the spraying, and could not comment further "because CCOF’s government affairs committee has not yet approved this revised position."

"We lobbied for an organically approved product and supported it last fall when lots of our members were suffering because they were in quarantine and couldn’t sell beyond county lines," was all Shipley would say.

Meanwhile, organic farmers who spoke on condition of anonymity largely supported aerial spraying for economic and environmental reasons.

"If the moth isn’t dealt with now, it’ll become a bigger problem, from both an environmental and toxic perspective," one farmer told us, citing the already high costs of controlling such bugs as coddling moths and medflies.

"This is somebody else’s pest at the moment, a nonnative pest," he said. "If farmers have to start dealing with LBAM as well, they’ll be ruined."

He also cited his belief that there aren’t 40 million pheromone-soaked twist ties on the market, which is what the CDFA claims is needed to blanket infested counties from the ground up with female pheromones to confuse the males.

Nigel Walker, an organic farmer in Dixon, recalled the devastating costs of quarantine thanks to a medfly-infested mango that someone brought back from Hawaii.

"Their vacation cost me $60,000 because of lost sales," Walker said. "So, for God’s sake, don’t bring, mail, or FedEx fruit and vegetables into California, because border inspectors are looking for bombs and terrorists, not produce and moths.

"We live in a global economy, and we have trade agreements that say if one person gets a pest, you have to do something about it," Walker added. "Nobody wants to be sprayed. Even when I spray organic seaweed on my fruit trees, I wear a mask. So I understand the gut reaction. But by refusing to be sprayed, you’re punishing the wrong person — the farmer — who already has to deal with the vagaries of the weather, the marketplace, and pests like the medfly."

Chris Mittelstaedt, who lives in San Francisco with his family and runs Fruitguys, a small business that delivers organic fruit to offices, said he’s personally against the spraying. "But as a company, we are going to wait a few weeks before letting people know what we officially think or endorse as a plan of action," Mittelstaedt told us.

Other city dwellers are less ambivalent. Frank Eggers, a former Fairfax mayor who is organizing a group called Stop the Spray, said, "[World Trade Organization] stuff is driving this so-called moth emergency.

"We’re allowing other countries to quarantine our produce. And with the global economy, climate change, and travel, we’re going be facing this issue continuously. But we can’t keep putting poison on our land, or say we’ll put you in quarantine if you don’t accept our aerial bombardment," he said.

Paul Schramski, state director of Pesticide Watch, worries that the state and federal agencies are still not listening to the people of California.

"If this is not being driven by trade agreements, then I’m not sure what is the driver. We don’t have all the facts. But it’s not being driven by actual crop damage," Schramski said. "We agree that this invasive moth should be controlled, but it’s a false premise to believe that the choice is between aerial spraying or nothing. The state has known since August that the public was opposed to spraying, so why aren’t we producing more twist ties?"

CDFA, which used $500,000 in USDA funds to hire PR agency Porter Novelli last November at the height of public outcry, is currently researching pheromone products that last up to 90 days and is also planning to use pheromone-loaded twist ties, sticky traps, and stingerless parasitic wasps in its LBAM program.

"We believe this to be a biological emergency," CDFA public affairs supervisor Steve Lyle told us. "If we waited a year or two, so we could first do an EIR, we would lose the battle and become generally infested."

Ironically, California’s best hope for not being sprayed ad infinitum may lie in the discovery that the moth has spread to other states.

"It would make a significant impact if we were to find the insect established in other places," the USDA’s Hawkins told us. "It doesn’t mean we would throw up our hands and walk away, but it would remove some of the argument that the rest of America is at risk from California if other states already have it."

But until that time, Hawkins warned that if state legislators demand a moratorium, forced spraying won’t be the federal government’s only option: "Maybe California would have to be quarantined. And now we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars."

Questioning Matt

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Matt Gonzalez consulted few of his colleagues in San Francisco’s progressive political community before announcing Feb. 28 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, that he’ll be Ralph Nader’s running mate on another quixotic run for president.

That’s fairly typical for Gonzalez, who has tended to keep mostly his own counsel for all of his big political decisions: switching from Democrat to Green in 2000; successfully running for president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2002; jumping into the mayor’s race at the last minute the next year; abruptly deciding not to run for reelection to his supervisorial seat in 2004; and — last year — deciding against another run for mayor while being coy about his intentions until the very end.

But if he had polled those closest to him politically, Gonzalez would have learned what a difficult and divisive task he’s undertaken (something he probably knew already given what a polarizing figure Nader has become). Not one significant political official or media outlet in San Francisco has voiced support for his candidacy, and some have criticized its potential to pull support away from the Democratic Party nominee and give Republican John McCain a shot at the White House.

In fact, most of his ideological allies are enthusiastically backing the candidacy of Barack Obama, who Gonzalez targeted with an acerbic editorial titled “The Obama Craze: Count Me Out” on the local BeyondChron Web site on the eve of his announcement (while not telling BeyondChron staffers of his impending announcement, to their mild irritation).

It’s telling that all of the top Green Party leaders in San Francisco — including Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, school board president and supervisorial candidate Mark Sanchez, and Jane Kim, who got the most votes in the last school board election after Gonzalez encouraged her to run — have endorsed Barack Obama.

Mirkarimi, who ran Nader’s Northern California presidential effort in 2000 and ran Gonzalez’s 2003 mayoral campaign, has had nothing but polite words for Gonzalez in public, but he reaffirmed in a conversation with the Guardian that his support for Obama didn’t waver with news of the Nader-Gonzalez ticket.

Mirkarimi has a significant African American constituency in the Western Addition and has worked hard to build ties to those voters. He’s also got a good head for political reality — and it’s hard to blame him if he thinks that the Nader-Gonzalez effort is going nowhere and will simply cause further tensions between Greens and progressive Democrats.

Sup. Chris Daly is strongly supporting Obama and said the decision of his former colleague to run didn’t even present him with a dilemma: “It’s unfortunately not a hard one — or fortunately, depending on how you look at it.”

Daly doesn’t think the Nader-Gonzalez will have much impact on the presidential race or the issues it’s pushing. “The movement for Obama is so significant that it eclipses everything else,” Daly told us. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change how politics happens in this country.”

While few San Francisco progressives argue that Obama’s policy positions are perfect, Daly doesn’t agree with Gonzalez’s critique of Obama’s bad votes and statements. “I don’t understand the argument that you should only back a candidate that you agree with all the time,” Daly said. “If that was the case, I would only ever vote for myself.”

On the national level, Gonzalez told us that he was running to challenge the two-party hold on power and to help focus Nader’s campaign on issues like ballot access for independent candidates. “If I’m his running mate, then we’ll be talking about electoral reform,” he said.

On a local level, the Gonzalez move will have a complicated impact. It will, in some ways, damage his ability to play a significant role in San Francisco politics in the future. That’s in part because Gonzalez has taken himself out of the position of a leader in the local progressive movement.

San Francisco progressives don’t like lone actors: the thousands of activists in many different camps don’t always agree, but they like their representatives to be, well, representative. That means when housing activists — one of Daly’s key constituencies — need someone to carry a major piece of legislation for them, they expect Daly to be there.

Sup. Tom Ammiano hasn’t come up with his landmark bills on health care, public power, and other issues all by himself; he’s been part of a coalition that has worked at the grassroots level to support the work he’s doing in City Hall.

Daly sought to find a mayoral candidate last year through a progressive convention. That seemed a bit unorthodox to the big-time political consultants who like to see their candidates self-selected and anointed by powerful donors, but it was very much a San Francisco thing. This is a city of neighborhoods, coalitions, and interest groups that try to hold their elected officials accountable.

Obama’s politics are far from perfect, and Nader and Gonzalez have very legitimate criticisms of the Democratic candidates and important proposals for electoral reform. But right now the grassroots action in San Francisco and elsewhere in the country — the movement-building excitement — is with Barack Obama. The activists who made the Gonzalez mayoral effort possible are now working on the Obama campaign.

In fact, Daly has repeatedly voiced hope that an Obama victory could help empower the progressive movement in San Francisco and give it more leverage against moderates like Mayor Gavin Newsom who support Hillary Clinton (see “Who Wants Change?” 1/30/08).

Daly said the Gonzalez decision complicates that narrative a little. “I don’t think it’s undercut,” Daly said, “but I think it’s confused a bit.”

Muni’s makeover

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY San Francisco’s streets are some of the most congested in the nation, our gasoline prices are reaching record highs, and parking is both scarce and expensive (particularly given the rising cost of parking tickets). But most drivers still haven’t been willing to switch to public transit, something that Muni officials hope to change with the help of a highly anticipated study that’s just been released.

The Transit Effectiveness Program (TEP) is a systemic proposal to make Muni faster and more attractive, mostly by focusing resources on the busiest routes. The study kicks off what could be a transformative year for the Municipal Transportation Agency, which got another $26 million annually through the passage of Proposition A in November 2007 and has been struggling for years to meet its on-time performance goals and win back lost riders.

It has been over two decades since Muni had its last major overhaul. The TEP boasts "hundreds of changes" in the works, from larger buses to route additions. The current draft of the proposal reflects 18 months of data collection on rider trends and community input. Officials found residents citywide were most concerned with reliability in the system.

"We have some schedules that are up to 10 minutes short of how long the line actually takes," said Julie Kirschbaum, program manager of the TEP. "We also need to reduce the number of breakdowns. We need more mechanics."

Data also showed 75 percent of Muni passengers board in the system’s 15 busiest corridors, which include the 49 Mission/Van Ness, 38 Geary, and 30 Stockton routes. TEP calls for increasing service on these corridors by 14 percent and cutting wait times to five minutes or less.

The study also proposed new routes to better reflect changing growth patterns and travel needs. For the first time, a bus would directly connect Potrero Hill with downtown. A new "downtown circulator" would loop Market Street on Columbus, Polk, and Folsom streets, replacing the 19 Polk and 12 Folsom. Some proposals would increase service between neighborhoods in the western and southern parts of the city as well as create better connections to BART and Caltrain for those who commute to or from the city.

University students and employees could also benefit from the TEP, as increased service to destinations such as San Francisco State University and University of San Francisco were high priorities for the project team. In order to maximize resources, some routes could be scaled back or removed, potentially making the walk to the bus stop a few blocks longer for some city residents. For example, in the Mission District, there is a proposal to fold the existing routes on Folsom and Bryant into a faster, higher-capacity route on Harrison. A proposal to end the 56 Rutland route would leave Visitation Valley even more isolated.

Once the TEP’s environmental impact report is complete sometime next year, there will be public hearings before the MTA board decides which recommendations to adopt. The Board of Supervisors could ultimately vote to overrule controversial route changes.

The TEP is one of many high profile green initiatives Mayor Gavin Newsom has rolled out, from a solar panel initiative he introduced with Assessor Phil Ting to the controversial appointment of Wade Crowfoot as the director of climate protection initiatives, whose salary is paid with MTA funds.

"The best thing we can do is get people out of single occupancy vehicles…. This mode shift is my primary goal," Crowfoot said at a Feb. 27 public information workshop, one of many planned throughout the coming months to educate and receive feedback from residents on the TEP.

Yet like many of Newsom’s splashier initiatives, the plan lacks clear funding sources and commitments. "There’s a whole capital piece to the TEP that’s been missing the whole time," Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and a member of the TEP’s policy advisory board, told us. "Without this capital element, TEP won’t happen."

Many of the proposals could be covered by reallocating operational costs, yet some expensive projects remain without a clear source of financing. Despite the price tag, Radulovich said ambitious investments now could more than pay for themselves in the long run: "If you’re smart about how you spend money, you can use capital money to save money in operating costs down the line."

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